Sheet Mulching, Creating a Garden, Salvaging Plants - My Homesteading Weekend Report

Creating a new garden, sheet mulching some plants, salvaging more plants, and snowdrops! This is my weekly homesteading weekend report all about these topics.

It was a busy weekend but I made some good progress on several projects. There is still a lot to do but that is just normal for a homesteader. But in between all that work I noticed that a bunch of bulbs are getting ready to bloom and the snowdrops are already up and blooming!

Creating a New Garden

My biggest project is my new kitchen garden. Up to now I have been mixing in vegetables among my trees and shrubs in my hedgerows and other growing areas. This has worked but I can't wait to have a kitchen garden where I can focus on growing fresh food for my family and I.

The garden will consist of 3 large hugelkultur beds that will be built around a central gathering area that will one day include an outdoor kitchen.

Over the weekend I started digging the first garden bed and I actually just finished digging it today. My little son loved helping out with the digging.

The flags in the picture are marking the boundaries of one of the other garden beds that I still need to dig. I doing these beds one at a time.

Each bed will have logs in the dug out part with the sod added back in and packed between the logs and soil added on top. More logs will be added as the beds are built up. Once the dug out part is filled I will build raised beds on top of the beds. More logs will be added and the whole thing will be topped off with a good layer of soil and then mulch. This should result in some great garden beds that need very little watering and no fertilizing.

Salvaging Plants

There was another salvage event of native plants and I was able to fill my car with sword ferns. I added these ferns to some of my hedgerows to add more diversity.

I also got a bunch of rotten wood that I will add to my new garden beds as I'm building them.

While I have a lot of logs to add to my hugelkultur beds the rotten wood will help speed up the decomposition of the buried wood by adding beneficial fungi and microbes to the beds.

Sheet Mulching

Last week I shared that I had added some logs and snags to an area that I'm turning into a food forest where my front lawn used to be. This last weekend I started sheet mulching the remaining grass area. This involved placing cardboard down on the grass and then wood chip mulch on top of it.

There is still a lot of grass to sheet mulch but I made some good progress. There is another area not shown in those pictures that I also covered. I have some new fruit trees coming and once they are planted I will be able to finish sheet mulching the food forest area. Ultimately, there will be no grass in this front area.

Fun and Busy Weekend

Well it was a very busy weekend but all in all I'm happy with the progress I made. This week I have a bunch of native plants arriving that I will need to plant. Depending on how long that takes I hope to get a lot done with the new kitchen garden. But the plants will need to be planted first.

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Hope you enjoyed this homesteading weekend report!